Getting Warmer

During the debate last month on the Climate Stewardship Act, Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, held up a map of the Arctic ice cap. The map, based on a series of nasa satellite photographs, showed the extent of year-round sea ice over the Arctic twenty-four years ago and the extent of that sea ice today. In 1979, the ice began halfway down the east coast of Greenland, extended over the North Pole, and stretched, uninterrupted, to Siberia. Now it begins above Greenland, and an expanse of open water extends north from Siberia for hundreds of miles. Altogether, the ice cap has shrunk by two hundred and fifty million acres, an area the size of California and Texas combined. According to nasa’s latest calculations, it is continuing to retreat at a rate of nine per cent per decade and could well disappear by the end of this century.

As McCain pointed out, the Climate Stewardship Act, which he co-sponsored with Senator Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat, is, on the scale of global catastrophe, “a very minimal proposal.” The bill would cap emissions of six greenhouse gases—most significantly, carbon dioxide—at 2000 levels and establish a trading system under which corporations that came in under their caps would receive credits, which they could sell to others. A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimated that the bill would cost the average household less than twenty dollars a year. (A similar cap-and-trade system, put in place in 1995 to combat acid rain, has helped to reduce sulfur-dioxide emissions in the United States by more than thirty per cent.) Minimal though it was, the McCain-Lieberman bill was nonetheless rejected in the Senate by a vote of fifty-five to forty-three, with ten Democrats crossing party lines to oppose it. It is a measure of how demoralized environmentalists are these days that many of them treated this solid defeat as a victory.

The Climate Stewardship Act was the first bill of its kind to reach the Senate floor since 1997, when the body effectively sank the Kyoto protocol by a vote of ninety-five to zero. In the intervening years, the evidence that human activity is changing the planet’s climate has continued to mount, as has evidence of the consequences. Roads in Alaska are buckling because of liquefying permafrost, islands are disappearing as a result of higher sea levels, and the glaciers of Glacier National Park are retreating so quickly that some have suggested, only half in jest, that the park will soon have to be renamed. Among the many unfortunate aspects of this vast melt-off is that, because bare ground and seawater absorb sunlight more efficiently than ice does, the warming process tends to be self-reinforcing. As nasa dryly put it in the press release accompanying its latest study of the shrinking ice cap, “The rate of decline is expected to accelerate due to positive feedback systems between the ice, oceans, and atmosphere.” In another nasa report, released last month, researchers found that between 1995 and 2000 the melting rate of the Patagonian ice fields, in Chile and Argentina, had more than doubled.

The United States funds much of the world’s best research on climate change, yet no other developed nation takes the results less seriously. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, chairs the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, which oversees legislation concerning carbon-dioxide emissions. In a two-hour speech on the subject a few months ago, Inhofe made a hash of several decades’ worth of climate studies, and concluded, “With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it.” Though it’s impossible to determine exactly how much of the current warming trend is the result of atmospheric changes wrought by man and how much is caused by natural climate variation, the vast majority of credible studies in fact point to the former as the more significant factor. President Bush, defending his opposition to all forms of carbon regulation, claims that he is waiting for a scientific consensus to emerge—even as his administration has been working hard to suppress the inconvenient fact that such a consensus already exists. This past spring, for example, when the Environmental Protection Agency was drafting a report on the general state of the environment, the White House edited—one might as well say censored—the section on climate, deleting references to a 1999 study that showed anomalously steep increases in global temperatures during the previous decade. These references were replaced by references to a rival report, financed in part by the American Petroleum Institute. (Just last week, in another gift to the energy industry, the administration announced that it was dropping more than fifty investigations into violations of the Clean Air Act by power-plant operators.)

In this context, the fact that the McCain-Lieberman bill was given a chance to fail actually does represent progress. Not that long ago, McCain, too, took the position that not enough was known about the climate to merit action; he became convinced of the urgency of the problem, he has said, after holding a set of hearings and listening to the evidence. McCain succeeded in getting the Climate Stewardship Act onto the floor by employing some of the same tactics he used to get his campaign-finance bill approved—in order to move the act out of Inhofe’s committee, he reportedly threatened to hold up the dreadful energy bill that is now making its way out of conference—and no one who watched him during the campaign-finance battle can doubt his tenacity. Moreover, as McCain suggested during last month’s debate, time is, in a grim sort of way, on his side. “We will be back,” he said after holding up his map of the ice cap. “Because these pictures will continue to get worse, and won’t improve until we begin to address this issue.”

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